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‘The highest paid civil servant in the Ministry of Defence charged the taxpayer £23,000 for luxury hotel stays in his first ten months in the job.

Bernard Gray, the man in charge of the department’s equipment programme, is paid £220,000 a year – far in excess of the £142,500 earned by the Prime Minister. Yet he racked up an astonishing £23,000 expenses bill for 106 overnight stays in London and Bristol – at a time when his department is facing huge budget cuts.

The spending on hotels is even more remarkable because Mr Gray’s home is just a 60-mile drive from his offices in Whitehall and the Defence Equipment and Support organisation at Abbey Wood in Bristol.’